The Parable of the "Talents"

This article is an examination of how one of Jesus’s greatest and most philosophical punchlines in lost in translation. It looks at both a parable and a specific word. The word is “translated” in the KJV and most other English Bibles and many other languages as “talents.” It is understood to represent a sum of money, but Jesus uses other words for “money” as well. Jesus only uses this word eight times, seven times in this parable. He uses this word because it is central to the point he is making.

The “Talent”

The word “talent” is actually untranslated because “talents” is just an English representation for the Greek word, talanton (ταλάντoν). The meaning of the word is “a weight." Not the concept of having weight, but “a weight,” the type that goes on a scale. It also means a pair of scales, and, in Greek mythology, the name of the scales on which Zeus balanced the fortunes of men, a central concept in this parable, also lost in translation.

As “a weight,” it also means a sum of money.  It was used like we would say "large" today referring to large amounts of money. As with currency today, its meaning changed depending on the type of currency. When I was small, five “large” meant five hundred dollars. Today, it is more likely to mean five thousand dollars.

I can’t criticize the translators for not translating it since “a weight” doesn’t make much sense to us today in talking about money because we don’t use weight of metal as money, but printed bills. However, as we will see, the whole point of the parable is lost if it isn’t translated as “weight.” The word “talent” misses the point, as does the translation, as does its translation to “bags of gold” (NIV) or “bags of silver” (NLT). However, they could have translated it as “a weight of gold,” which would have made the both the punchline and the meaning of the parable clear.

The Parable

The Parable itself runs from Matthew 25:14 to Matthew 25:30. It is examined in detail at ChristsWords.com, which you can access by the links above, going from verse to verse using the links at the bottom of each article.

The story is simple. A masters gives three of his servants different weights of money, five to one, two to another, and one to the last, each according to his ability. The first two invest the weights they were given, doubling it. The last one buries the money. When the master returns, he praises the first two and elevates them, giving them power over men not just over a few things but many men. The last one, who didn’t use the money, is labeled as useless and cowardly and thrown into the outer darkness.

The punchline is in the condemnation of the last servant (in Matthew 25:28), where the master says literally, “Lift, really, from him, that weight [of gold] and give it to the one bearing those ten weights.” In English translation the word meaning primarily “lift” is mistranslated as “take,” which is another word in Greek entirely. And the word meaning “bearing” is translated as “having,” which is its primary meaning, but in the context of “weight,” it also has the sense in “to bear” or “to carry.”

In this punchline, Jesus equates wealth with a burden. He makes it clear that those who can bear the burden, making their wealth productive, should be given more of it. This is not only in the punchline but the moral of the story in Matthew 25:29. In that verse, it is stated like a law of nature and as the law of the Divine. And the fate of those who squander the wealth they are given is described as pretty dismal as well as well (Matthew 25:30) with one of Jesus’s catchphrases, which we will discuss in some future article. Anyone who has lived a long time can testify that this fate pretty accurately describes those who do not know how to make the most of what they gave been given.

This analogy is extraordinary because it is the most direct praise of making money that I have ever seen in any religious work. In other verses, Jesus tells people to give up their wealth, but in the context of this story, he clearly means this in the sense of giving up a burden, like the burden of debt. If we want to dedicate our lives to something else, we cannot also carry the burdens of managing money.

Of course, we can broaden Jesus’s message to making the most of all our God-given “talents,” in sense of our skills and abilities. Our English word comes originally from the Greek. In Old French of the 12th century, the word came to mean "inclination, disposition, will, desire” from its meaning in Medieval Latin, but in Classical Latin, it meant "balance, weight; sum of money," from Greek.

Conclusion

I could, of course, write much more about all the interesting Greek words in this parable. It uses a lot of words that are uncommon for Jesus, relating to how money is made. For example, it repeatedly describes the “unprofitable” (an uncommon word) as “cowardly” using a number of different terms. So Jesus clearly connect making money with risk and the courage to face risks. However, I don’t want to confuse Jesus’s main point, that managing money is a weight we must bear.